"Congress" = 'House of Representatives'?

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:45 PM -0800 11/7/06, Dave Wilton wrote:
>Just Google the phrase "congress and the senate" and you get lots of
>examples.
>
>Similarly, taking your example and Googling "435 members of Congress" turns
>up plenty of examples too.

Right, but I was wondering if anyone had come across any examples in
the wild, to get a sense of whether this was especially a new trend.
(The first one I found was from 2001, so not brand-new, and I
couldn't search on Nexis for obvious reasons.)

LH

>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
>Laurence Horn
>Sent: Tuesday, November 07, 2006 11:52 AM
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>Subject: "Congress" = 'House of Representatives'?
>
>For a query from a journalist, does anyone have some clear examples
>of the use of "Congress" to refer specifically to the House of
>Representatives, excluding the Senate?  This would of course parallel
>the semantic narrowing of "Congressman" over a century ago:
>
>1888 BRYCE Amer. Commw. I. xiv. 197 note, The term 'Congressman' is
>commonly used to describe a member of the House of Representatives,
>though of course it ought to include senators also.
>[OED, s.v. "congressman"]
>
>Partial evidence for the shift would be cases of "(in the) Congress
>or (the) Senate", but these could conceivably be referring to "either
>the Congress (as a whole) or the Senate specifically", such as a web
>site providing a "Sample Letter to Congress or Senate".   More
>unambiguous would be a reference to a bill having to pass (both)
>Congress and Senate, or even to candidates for Congress or Senate.
>Or to the 100 members of the Senate and the 435 members of Congress.
>Ah, here's one:
>
>Citizen journalists have now investigated and submitted information
>on all 435 members of Congress!
>
>www.sunlightlabs.com/research/familybusiness/
>
>LH
>
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